I'm starting to feel like most of my recent shape ideas are just remixes of old ideas, but I guess it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? There's bound to be an element that we've used on at least one of the other fifty or sixty ships. And there's only so much combinations out there, I think. My next plan is to start involving the Z-axis in the equasion more frequently, especially on larger ships where vertical slice is actually noticable in battle.

I always wanted to do a flying saucer for Vanguard, but I suppose giving them a bootleg Enterprise NX-01 is sufficient enough replacement. But man, flying saucers are never not cool. You should hear all the quest/encounter ideas that go around the office when they get mentioned. Cow abduction may or may not be involved.

This new batch of weapons finally convinced me to make a switch from Kerkythea to Blender Cycles as a renderer of choice. I can't afford to wait 40 minutes for each picture to get ready. I can't even go and do anything else while it's computing in background! There are probably some smart tweaks I could have done to make it go faster, but ugh, can't be bothered to dive into technicalities of ray tracing. Especially since Cycles does it literally ten times faster out of the box. It can also render objects on a transparent background, which is just sooooo freaking useful. No more black and white mask passes, baby!

The scene took a little while to set up, but now the pipeline is all nice and neat. Sketchup models import surprisingly well too. Not well enough for game assets or even high poly meshes, of course, but enough to look good in the viewport, which is what matters! Here's our Tornado Rocket Launcher! I paint over each of my renders to give it a slightly painterly look, accentuate shapes and compensate for the lack of properly beveled edges.

I figured I'll stop apologizing for long delays between posts, because when you read it as an archive it just looks like a long string of me making excuses, lol.

WIP on Balmung, new Vanguard battlecruiser. Look at that, painting ships again! :D I've gotten pretty rusty at it since that kind of work is usually redirected to DrBanana nowadays. Mostly doing it to get myself out of an after-test funk and do something that's not as cerebral as UI design for a change.

Balmung is a very puffy boy. Don't insult his body composition, he's very sensitive. And also has a large variety of deadly weapons, so probably not the brightest idea either way <3

Generating space clouds all day every day. Really wish I had a render farm for this. And also, like, a basic grasp of Blender, but let's not get greedy. It's still not very nebula-like, and the resolution is awful, but I might keep at it, since drawing nebula by hand in Photoshop really doesn't have the same feel and texture to it.